Question

I have a Person class (annotated with @XmlRootElement) in Java with two properties (name, birthday), which I need to marshal in two different ways, generating two different XML files.

In the first file, the Person object should contain only the name property:

<Person>
    <name>John Doe</name>
</Person>

In the second file, the Person object should contain all properties.

<Person>
    <name>John Doe</name>
    <birthday>1980-01-01</birthday>
</Person>

Is there a way to achieve this with JAXB?

Regards,
Jochen

Answer 1

Note: I’m the EclipseLink JAXB (MOXy) lead and a member of the JAXB 2 (JSR-222) expert group.

You can use JAXB annotations to provide one representation, and leverage MOXy’s external binding document to provide alternate representations.

Use Case 1 – Minor Differences Between Representations

By default MOXy’s external mapping document is used to override metadata provided by annotations. This allows you to tweak the representation between versions. Below is a link to an answer I gave with a detailed example:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/9432435/383861

Use Case 2 – Major Differences Between Representations

MOXy’s external mapping document can also be used to override all the annotations. This is useful when the representations are not related. Below is a link to an example where I map the same object model to both the Google and Yahoo weather services:

• http://blog.bdoughan.com/2011/09/mapping-objects-to-multiple-xml-schemas.html

For More Information

• http://blog.bdoughan.com/search/label/jaxb.properties
• http://blog.bdoughan.com/2010/12/extending-jaxb-representing-annotations.html